Self Analysis

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I've really missed WP. It's been a very disorienting year and I wish that I had continued posting and building friendships. It's rather odd being here and seeing new members with high post counts. It's going to take a while to get a sense of everything. Its good to see that the community is still going strong at any rate.

Anyway egocentric though this may sound I spend a great deal of time analysing my mental processes. I've just become aware of this however and the extent to which it happens. I have made "me" into a subject to be probed and deconstructed. The result is that instinct and gut feeling are just being taken over by calculation.

I constantly examine my thoughts and I examine my conclusions and the process of examination itself. Im starting to feel robotic but I cant stop it.

When I try to explain the way I feel to people it also comes out. I can be in the middle of a crisis and i'll be narrating the pain like a surgeon. Whenever I have sought help people do seem to be put off by this. I think that I come off as self obsessed and arrogant.

It isn't my self that im obsessed with however. Im simply obsessed with my thoughts themselves and how the gestalt becomes the self. My brain is a special interest.

Does anyone else do this? Self analysis is one thing but actively making the executive mind a subject of study is maddening because it never stops and it leads to awful anxiety. It also makes depression that much worse because it becomes easier to get trapped in negative thought cycles. On the other hand it does reveal ALOT about you as a person.

I've spent a lot of time pondering my life, my problems, how I feel about things, the sources of my insecurity, the future, what I want in life, everything else in between. I know what you are saying about disassociating yourself from it, for a long time I thought and I think its defence mechanism. My biggest problem is my inability to share when I have a problem or in crisis, I always minimize and try to draw attention away from myself. I can't help it, its part of the anxiety. It's embarrassment and shame of myself. I have to accept who I am and what I need help with.

I think while it can get you into negative thought cycle as you said I do think I've benefited from this introspection more than I've hurt, I know myself and I know what my weakness and what I want now. When I get my back put against the wall, getting help doesn't seem so painful compared to that place. It's a great motivator, it's a great priority changer. I have to, I don't have a choice, it's either get better or get dead.

I did go through a lengthy period of trying to relate all of my feelings, behaviour and dreams to what happened to me in early childhood, but there comes a point where you have to go beyond the memories that are stored as a series of recognizable sequential events and enter a world of raw visceral pain and abstract weirdness, which is very difficult to place into an original context in terms of understanding and dealing with at a cognitive level, assuming you can even go there. You'd need a highly skilled therapist to take you down to that level in stages to override the brain's gating system that regulates the feelings that are sourced from the more primitive areas.

Yeah - "self" as special interest; I can relate to that. It's exhausting.

I've always done it to a certain extent but the last couple of years its a lot worse. And it accomplishes nothing apart from increasing anxiety and feeding depression.

I should have some psychology appts coming up, and if he's any good maybe he might help.

Yes, I've been like that since around age 14, and I also have the depression and anxiety.
I use an incredible amount of filtering (inhibition) between my conscious and subconscious thought.

I do a lot of introspection. Never had much depression as far as I know, and my anxiety is either mild or short-lived. The driver for it in my case is probably dissatisfaction and a general feeling that there's always room for improvement. And I'm just interested in what makes me tick.

But I have a general interest in analysing pretty much anything, so I also spend a lot of time pondering how other people tick and how to solve whatever practical problems come my way. I like being scientific about things, it usually gets a better result than whatever method other people use.

Could you explain this a bit more in detail?

There's a significant separation between my conscious and subconscious. I can watch my conscious thinking, and to some extent my subconscious as well, though most of that is hidden.
In conscious thought I have constructed an extensive series of binary logic gates in order to filter input from the subconscious. It's a set of conditionals that basically test or ask questions about bits of data.
The initial checks or tests are to determine if the data has to do with something real (material), or conceptual (imaginary), and then the data is handled very differently based on this initial assessment. Different types of logic gates are applied to each. For example material data will have the laws of physics (as I have learned) automatically applied. A conceptual bit of data is handled with different logic, often based on a constructed simulation of identity. This tries to simulate what NTs do intuitively in their subconscious.
I can't really rely on the intuitive inputs coming from my subconscious in the case of conceptual data, so that data is heavily filtered and I rely on the simulation instead.
As is, my subconscious does not run the same software as the NTs, and so it does not produce anywhere near the same results.
If I'm dealing with something physical like riding a bike, then I can trust the intuition from my subconscious just fine, but not with conceptual things like language and other types of social interactions.

Inhibition means that the flow of data is being slowed down and filtered heavily before being processed further. It's a series of stops, checks, - conditionals that are applied.

How do you differentiate between the conscious and subconscious mind?

I'll try to answer in a way that's hopefully understandable.

My subconscious runs on autopilot, or thinks on its own mostly outside of my control of will. It operates lightning fast and produces results that are in percentages of probability, so things like conclusions are quite fuzzy. I have very little control over what my subconscious does, but I heavily filter any information that comes from my subconscious.

My conscious mind is in my control and is structured in a very orderly manner. It uses binary logic gates much like a computer program or electrical circuit. It produces yes or no results that are not fuzzy. It is very systematic, but much slower than the subconscious.

I can watch/observe both parts working separately and I can control the conscious side by my will, but have very little control over the subconscious side.

When I'm working a word problem in physics or math, it's my conscious mind doing all the work. It takes me time to intentionally construct the visuals in my imagination and to systematically calculate an answer.

When I ride a bicycle, it's my subconscious mind doing all the work. It quickly calculates all the movements and corrections my muscles have to execute to ride smoothly. It's very quick. It's quick enough to provide both useful current probably results, and also future possibilities of results.
My conscious mind can be working on something completely different while the subconscious handles the physical movements of riding the bike.

I can observe some of what goes on in the subconscious, but it's limited, and sometimes it's easier than other times.
Generally speaking, if you can quiet down your conscious thought to a much lower level of activity, then it can become easier to observe the subconscious at work.

I think the limitations start to factor in where the subconscious uses its own symbolic type of language to work with. Some of the symbols are what are considered archetypes, but I can only identify some of those, and most of them are either unrecognizable to me, or just out of my sight completely.

Also, deep in the brain the subconscious is also powered by chemicals, and though I can't "see" that happening in thought, I can "feel" the effects of the chemicals, not always being able to correctly identify or follow each feeling.
I certainly feel several types of anxiety, and wish I had the power to stop it.

Ah I think I understand a little better. Im still not sure how you know where the conscious ends and the subconscious begins though. I definitely agree with the idea that the subconscious processes archetypes though. Archetypes are themselves multi layered. Eventually they all converge to a single point as does everything I guess